Hoops history comes alive

Historian has three books on Clay, Mishawaka and John Glenn basketball.

Historian has three books on Clay, Mishawaka and John Glenn basketball.

August 04, 2006|JIM MEENAN Tribune Staff Writer

How well do you know your local basketball? Did you know John Wooden and Mishawaka High School coach Shelby Shake once had to be separated during a game after Shake questioned the integrity of Wooden, the South Bend Central coach? Or that Clay's 1994 state championship team achieved the ultimate ---- a state title ---- only after a bit of a makeover of its roster and roles from the previous year? Or how about the fact that the first game between two high schools in St. Joseph County was played in a classroom at the old Mishawaka High School in January 1904? South Bend won the contest in cramped quarters, 20-19. It's all there in the first offerings of Scott Shuler, an archival assistant by day at the Northern Indiana Center for History. Working nights and weekends on the project, Shuler followed a longtime desire to study local basketball and what it once meant to the community. The result ---- so far ---- is three books detailing the history of boys basketball at Mishawaka High School, Clay High School and John Glenn High School. The Glenn book includes information about Tyner, North Liberty, Walkerton and Greene Township. The books feature plenty of photographs and interviews on 90 to 110 pages -- 8 1/2 by 11 inches -- giving locals some rare insight into their school's basketball past. "I interviewed coaches, players, bus drivers, cheerleaders, fans, scorekeepers, trying to get a variety of perspectives about what the experience of basketball was," Shuler said. "I am really interested in how basketball was a reflection of neighborhoods, communities and small towns, and how that has been lost." The books are done in interview form after short introductions that offer perspective. "I wanted to use the oral history approach to kind of investigate that and also to kind of let the people who experienced that history tell the story," Shuler said. He was able to get a lot of the pictures from old yearbooks, giving the books more than the usual flavor. Some pictures really set the tone -- male cheerleaders, for example, or a title-winning team where the head coach insisted on having hundreds of fans in the picture. There are old dimly lit gyms from the old days, mini-skirts from the Sixties and Seventies. He wants people to know that basketball, for many people, meant much more than numbers in a scorebook or names in a yearbook. Shuler grew up in North Liberty. With the advent of the four-class system for basketball, he wanted fans to remember what, for him and other Hoosiers, was truly a golden age -- when the tiny school from the tiny town competed with the giants from the metropolitan areas. "When you have a Tyner going up against a Plymouth," Shuler said, "a Walkerton versus South Bend Central, these were major events in a community's history. "Even if they got killed, even if they knew they were going to get killed." The books sell for $12 each. And Shuler plans to add a few more on local basketball to his shelves before he's done -- including one on South Bend Central, where former UCLA legendary coach Wooden coached early in his career. Shuler said each of the first three books took about three months of work, taking up 30 to 40 hours a week in his spare time. "It was terrific fun," he said. "It had to be, because it was a lot of work."Staff writer Jim Meenan: jmeenan@sbtinfo.com (574) 235-6342